Made From Memories

December 6, 1990|By ELIZABETH ROBERTS, Special to the Sun-Sentinel

The distinctive red-and-white checked cover has yellowed to a toasty tan spotted with the essences of many meals. But it remains instantly recognizable as Better Homes and Gardens` classic for beginning cooks.

As I sat in the kitchen, turning the delicate pages and reading aloud sections that caught my eye, Mom interjected: ``Honestly, every time you come home you spend hours studying that cookbook. You might as well take it home with you.``

With that, the cookbook that occupied a permanent place in my heart found a permanent place in my home.

I love this book, both for its anachronisms and its timelessness. It harkens back to the era when ``Gay Garnishes`` could be construed as nothing more controversial than potatoes wrapped in foil; when the mark of a good dinner was that it was hearty and tasty, rather than healthy and tasteful; when cookie recipes unabashedly called for real butter, and lots of it.

It offered advice on everything from barn-raising parties to laundry problems, all related in a chatty tone that might be considered patronizing today, but back then was just considered friendly.

It assumed the continuing sanctity of family meals, offering such helpful hints as: ``Introduce new food occasionally and take a family vote,`` and, ``Keep a few simple garnishes on hand. The family will appreciate those.``

Its ``Special Meals`` weren`t for diabetics or people with high blood pressure; they were the focal points of special occasions. The menu for a housewarming, for example: ``Assorted small sandwiches (Pimento Cheese, Deviled Ham, Nut Bread, Date-and-Cream Cheese on Whole Wheat; tray of relishes (sweet pickles, olives and celery chunks); Fancy Cookies, Salted Nuts, Fruit Punch, Sherry Wine or Spiced Cider.`` And the following helpful hint: ``Serve help-yourself at a pretty table or invite several young girls to see that all the guests are well supplied with food and drink.``

``Breakfast,`` the book advised, should be ``eaten every day,`` and every one of the suggested menus included sausage, eggs or both, with enough food to sustain a Wisconsin farmer in December.

The newfangled pressure cooker merited an entire section, with an assortment of recipes curiously similar to those in the subsequent edition -- in the chapter dedicated to the slow cooker.

And ``Cutting Cooking Corners`` explained how to get bread in half the time by doubling the yeast, instead of finding a closer Publix.

Salted throughout the book, pages of notebook paper inscribed in Mom`s own hand document the process for making ``Beef and Pork Sausage,`` ``Antelope Steak,`` ``Venison Pot Roast`` and ``Elk Roast.`` Whether Mom spent any time with these delicacies outside of what it took to paste them into the cookbook, I do not know. I`m fairly certain, however, that there has never been an Elk (or a Rotary Club member, for that matter) at the family table.

Yet, if such recipes and advice no longer apply, there are still the timeless recipes for pies and pastry in Chapter 15, spotted with traces of those confections made over the years. And there is that one time of year when the age of this book becomes more sacred than curious, and that is the Christmas holidays.

It has been years since we all left home and Mom stopped making the Christmas fruitcake. In giving me this book three years ago, she formally passed the torch and, since then, it has been I who mark the start of the holiday season for the family.

As my mother did every year that I remember, I have resurrected this book the weekend after Thanksgiving. I lift off a cover long divorced from its mate, and turn the fragile pages to the recipe for a ``Very Best Fruitcake`` that actually is the very best fruitcake I`ve ever tasted.

Chapter 7, Page 13, is tattered and brown, and large pieces of it are missing. The recipe is peppered with notes carefully inscribed over decades of fruitcake-making trials. ``Cloves`` is crossed out and replaced with ``cinnamon`` and ``orange juice`` has been replaced by brandy and angostura bitters.

The sight of that page stirs memories of my sisters and me cracking nuts, chopping green and red candied cherries and licking the butter-flavored bowl in anticipation of a Christmas treat. In fact, I had reached the age of majority before I realized that nuts could be purchased without their shells, that candied fruit came pre-chopped and that those tasks were Mom`s way of keeping us quiet while including us in the Christmas ritual.

Even today, I recall her caution that the butter must be browned and that unfloured fruit sinks to the bottom of the pan. I take special care to toss the fruit in the flour so that each piece is coated.